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Reflora - Historic Repatriation of Brazilian Flora
Last modified: 2011-09-19
Abstract
The Botanical Garden of Rio de Janeiro (JBRJ) is responsible for the repatriation of images of historic vouchers held by Royal Botanical Garden, Kew (K); and Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris (P). The project is financed by Brazilian Government and private sponsors, and coordinate by National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).
The Reflora will be focused on vouchers of 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries collected in Brazil by foreign researchers and deposited in Kew and Paris, which will be transferred to Rio as high resolution images of the dried plants. The images and textual information associated will become part of the Virtual Herbarium for Knowledge and Conservation of Brazilian Flora.
Images of herbarium specimens are scanned at high resolution and saved in TIFF format. Those files will be physically transferred to Rio using external hard drives. For transcription, however, low resolution files in JPG or PNG format are sent over the internet.
When the low resolution images arrive in Rio, they are processed and imported into a transcription system. Processing images includes resizing, cropping, search for label in scanned sheet using Haar-like features, and pyramid segmentation. The pyramid segmentation enables images to be used in a zooming user interface, like “OpenZoom” and “Zoomify”.
The transcription system has been developed at the Center for Scientific Computing and GIS of JBRJ. It is a set of tools to manipulate images and convert text file between formats, a database and a web page. Using the system, the label data are typed by trained people into a form and stored in a database.
Thereafter, the label data are send back to source institution of images. The format of data is in accordance to the original systems. In Paris, for example, the format is compatible with Sonnerat.
The Reflora project is a three-year project, started in 2011 and planned to finish in 2013. During this time, Reflora will repatriate around 600 thousand samples of dried material in digital form.
The Reflora will be focused on vouchers of 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries collected in Brazil by foreign researchers and deposited in Kew and Paris, which will be transferred to Rio as high resolution images of the dried plants. The images and textual information associated will become part of the Virtual Herbarium for Knowledge and Conservation of Brazilian Flora.
Images of herbarium specimens are scanned at high resolution and saved in TIFF format. Those files will be physically transferred to Rio using external hard drives. For transcription, however, low resolution files in JPG or PNG format are sent over the internet.
When the low resolution images arrive in Rio, they are processed and imported into a transcription system. Processing images includes resizing, cropping, search for label in scanned sheet using Haar-like features, and pyramid segmentation. The pyramid segmentation enables images to be used in a zooming user interface, like “OpenZoom” and “Zoomify”.
The transcription system has been developed at the Center for Scientific Computing and GIS of JBRJ. It is a set of tools to manipulate images and convert text file between formats, a database and a web page. Using the system, the label data are typed by trained people into a form and stored in a database.
Thereafter, the label data are send back to source institution of images. The format of data is in accordance to the original systems. In Paris, for example, the format is compatible with Sonnerat.
The Reflora project is a three-year project, started in 2011 and planned to finish in 2013. During this time, Reflora will repatriate around 600 thousand samples of dried material in digital form.